Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond take pictures of construction sites and put the world on their friends’ shoulders.

Whoever sees Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond for the first time and meets them at a highly frequented place won’t have any difficulty to identifying them pretty quickly: after all, there might not be so many couples where both wear their hair sharply clipped as short as possible. Their haircuts are only an external reference to their tight collaboration. They have been producing their films, photos and installations as a team for the last ten years.

Still, they were pretty astonished to meeting a couple last year who works together like they do, recounts Ruth Anderwald in their bright studio in Vienna’s second district. The aforesaid couple, a piano player and a rhythmicist, was then asked to participate and pose for Anderwald + Grond’s new Atlases project. In this recent work, friends and acquaintances lied down on the ground, with their arms and legs reaching out to the air. Looking at these pictures upside down, one could assume that they are »carrying« the world on their shoulders. »It is all about the human being, trying to define his relationship with the world,« Anderwald explains. During their photo sessions, Anderwald + Grond remarked that elderly people were were much more relaxed and quiet, more in harmony with themselves than the younger ones.

Stories like these show Anderwald + Grond as to be detailed and alert witnesses of their surroundings. The same can be said for their reflections on construction sites. They were entrusted to accompany the building progress of the new southern wing of the Schlossmuseum in Linz, Upper Austria, with their camera. While their photos never try to embellish the subject, they nonetheless hold a highly aesthetic quality, thanks to their often unusual perspectives and exceptional observations. »A construction site is a place that actually should not really exist, there is something destructive about it. After all, you’ve got to dig a cavern first, you must destroy the soil before constructing something new,« says Anderwald, »Building something has a lot to do with projections. It is incredibly complex, considering its course.« So the two artists are fairly amazed that construction sites are so rarely featured in the history of art.

This marks another of the couple’s very characteristic attributes: they never work without their feet on the ground, and background knowledge is inevitable essential for them. This becomes clear once more when taking a look at their most recent work, a series of nocturnal photographs. As a matter of course they read the book Tiefer als der Tag gedacht (Thought Deeper than the Day), which was published last year by the cultural scholar Elisabeth Bronfen. And of course they are well aware of what happens with the nervous system when dusk is approaching.

One of the duo’s areas of specialization is the early experimental film. Years ago, they shot a subtle documentation on one of the pioneers of this genre, the American Bruce Baillie. Their own work is also influenced by it. For instance, in a walk-in camera obscura, they projected a 16-mm film showing the solar eclipse of 2006, its rhythmic patterns following the twelve-tone music.

When talking to Anderwald + Grond about their art, their thoughts are jumping associatively between music theory, lyric poetry, everyday life, biochemistry, art history, photography and politics: their radius of attention is wide. Thanks to this, the danger of self- repetition is inexistent, in comparison to many of their colleagues. It might also be the result of their constant interaction.